I. Field
The present disclosure relates generally to communication, and more specifically to techniques for supporting operation of relay stations in wireless communication systems.
II. Background
Wireless communication systems are widely deployed to provide various communication content such as voice, video, packet data, messaging, broadcast, etc. These wireless systems may be multiple-access systems capable of supporting multiple users by sharing the available system resources. Examples of such multiple-access systems include Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) systems, Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) systems, Frequency Division Multiple Access (FDMA) systems, Orthogonal FDMA (OFDMA) systems, and Single-Carrier FDMA (SC-FDMA) systems.
A wireless communication system may include a number of base stations that can support communication for a number of user equipments (UEs). The system may also include relay stations that can improve the coverage and capacity of the system without the need for a potentially expensive wired backhaul link. A relay station may be a “decode and forward” station that may receive a signal from an upstream station (e.g., a base station), process the received signal to recover data sent in the signal, generate a relay signal based on the recovered data, and transmit the relay signal to a downstream station (e.g., a UE).
A relay station may communicate with a base station on a backhaul link and may appear as a UE to the base station. The relay station may also communicate with one or more UEs on an access link and may appear as a base station to the UE(s). However, the relay station typically cannot transmit and receive at the same time on the same frequency channel. Hence, the backhaul and access links may be time division multiplexed. Furthermore, the system may have certain requirements that may impact the operation of the relay station. It may be desirable to support efficient operation of the relay station in light of its transmit/receive limitation as well as other system requirements.